Category: DIY

Ah, fall is almost here! Our first cool front of the season rolled through last night. Outside, the birds are singing, the children are playing, and there’s a lovely breeze blowing. We’re topping off at about 85 degrees today, which to much of the country, I understand, is still considered quite warm. However, here in Texas, it’s about 20 degrees cooler than it has been! With that in mind, I’m going to keep this post short and sweet so I can go outside and get to play a little with the kids.

Now, here in our little corner of the world, we harvest most of our food in June, before it gets so hot that everything dries up and withers away. So, we’ve had our vegetables picked and put away for a couple of months, now. However, in much of the country, folks are just now starting to bring in that delicious garden bounty.

I know I like to have all of our cans in the pantry look nice and pretty. So, this year, I decided to make some labels to put on the jars to give them a more organized, uniform look in the pantry. Also, if we decide to give some of our produce as gifts to our friends and family, pretty labels really make those jars look nice! Just tie a pretty little bow around the lid, and there you have it! No other gift wrap necessary!

So, if you have been busy canning all your produce to keep for the year ahead, why not pretty those jars up a little with some nice labels? At the bottom of this post, you can find the labels I used. I’m offering them for you to use. Please feel free to download them, and use them for your pantry. I only ask that you direct people to this post if they wish to use them, too! There are several different styles to choose from. You can print them out on label paper, or on cardstock to tie on with a pretty ribbon. Get creative!

This weekend, I was reminded of a fantastic little addition to our medicine cabinet when Bear accidentally encountered a couple yellow jackets while fishing with her Daddy. Insect stings hurt! Especially yellow jackets…but it doesn’t matter what critter did the stinging, they just hurt. There can sometimes be quite a bit of swelling after one of these encounters as well. So, how do you take the sting out to make your little ones comfortable again?

I’ve heard several home remedies for insect stings in my life…most of them from my grandmother. I’ve tried all of these at least once, and for the most part, she has a pretty good track record for knowing things that work…no matter how crazy they sound! Now, my granddad, on the other hand, he wanted to put kerosene on everything…he even kept some in his medicine cabinet. I wouldn’t suggest kerosene, but I do have a couple of my grandmother’s suggestions to pass along!

Maalox

Maalox was my grandmother’s go-to for insect stings…ant stings in particular. I was terribly susceptible to ant stings when I was young. If I got one on my toe, my foot would swell so badly that I couldn’t put shoes on within an hour. I grew out of it for the most part, but they’re still a nuisance! Grandmother would dab liquid Maalox onto my stings, and, while it didn’t help the excessive swelling too much, it really did help the pain.

Meat Tenderizer

A doctor at my university’s student health center actually suggested meat tenderizer when I was bit by a spider (not an insect, I know) in my dorm room. I tried it…you actually make a paste to apply by adding water (some folks say to use vinegar instead, but I haven’t tried it that way). It worked pretty well to take the pain out, but there was still a lot of swelling, and it still turned purple, prompting an after-hours visit to the ER. Maybe I should have used it with vinegar!

Aspirin

I’ve heard this one from a lot of folks. It makes sense, really. It’s not as crazy as meat tenderizer! Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory medication. You can crush a tablet, and make it into a paste with a little water…then apply it to the insect sting. This method works fairly well, but it takes a little while. It’s definitely not as fast-acting as the next remedy.

Laundry Bluing

Laundry bluing? What on earth is that??? Fear not, that was my first reaction when my grandmother first suggested it to me.

I took the kids up to visit my parents and grandparents one summer. Apparently, at a stop along the way, we gained an additional passenger who remained unnoticed until a couple hours later. Lizard was only about a year and a half old at the time. She had fallen asleep, but just before we reached our destination, she woke up and started screaming. I couldn’t figure out what was going on while driving into Dallas rush-hour traffic, so I pulled over, and managed to get her calmed down…though I still couldn’t find the cause. Well, a couple hours later, at my grandmother’s house, I laid her down on the floor to change her diaper. There was a huge welt on her leg. She had been fussy ever since the incident in the car…and now I knew why. Something had stung her on the leg. It was big and red and angry! I made a rather surprised exclamation about it, and my grandmother came to look. She said, “That’s a bee sting. I just bought some bluing.”

I looked at her like a cow looking at a new gate. “Bluing? Is that what you said? What’s that?”

“It’s for laundry.” She stated rather emphatically.

“Okay…”

My mom jumped in, “People used to use it a lot to make their whites brighter.”

“Okay…” I was still waiting for someone to tell me why we were talking about brighter whites in every load instead of my daughter’s giant bee sting.

“Mother used to use it on us when we got stung, but I hadn’t thought about it in years. It takes the sting out, and all the swelling will be gone by bedtime. I just bought some last week I just happened to come across. Let me see if I can find it.” Grandmother took off for her back bedroom to look for it.

I looked at my mom and shrugged my shoulders, still a bit dubious. But, I figured I might as well give it a try.

My grandmother returned after a few minutes with a little blue bottle labeled, “Mrs. Stewart’s Liquid Bluing” and a few cotton balls. She said, “Put a little of the bluing on the cotton, then dab it on the sting. Make sure you cover the whole thing. Try to keep her still until it dries, because it will get all over everything and it will stain.”

So, I did as instructed. I made a big blue painting with that stuff all over Lizard’s leg. By the time we sat down for dinner, Lizard had stopped fussing. By the time I changed her next diaper, the swelling was gone. She still had a big blue splotch…but no swelling. I used it again the next morning, just to be sure…but I had a hard time telling where the sting had even been. I was sold. Grandmother told me to keep the bottle, and I did!

I’ve used it several more times since then…every time someone gets an insect sting. It has a great track record for bee stings, and for yellow jacket stings…including Bear’s little encounter over the weekend. She was stung on the leg and on the nose. At first, she didn’t want me to turn her nose blue, but within minutes of the time I put it on her leg, she said her leg didn’t hurt any more and wanted it on her nose too. So, Bear had a blue nose Sunday afternoon…and I didn’t hear another complaint about her nose. By Monday, her nose wasn’t blue anymore, but that yellow jacket sting was gone too. A blue nose is a small price to pay!

So, next time you or one of your little ones gets an insect sting, give bluing a try. You may be just as surprised as I was.

Incidentally, while bluing is great for insect stings, you can also grow a fantastic crystal garden with it, I’ve been told. It’s on the list to try this week!

Back when Andrew and I first got married, I was working for a diagnostic lab in the veterinary school at the university in our town. Not too long after we found out Bear was on the way, I was promoted to Laboratory Supervisor. I was responsible for making sure the lab ran smoothly, and making sure our results were dependable. Part of that job included making sure all of our machines were functioning properly, and that any new machines or equipment was set up and running as quickly as possible.

I wasn’t bad at my job. I checked through all of our results daily, and made sure all the routine maintenance was done on all of our instruments. All of our chemicals were in stock and up to date. Everything was going fairly smoothly, until one fateful day.

The medical director for our lab was excited. We were finally getting our own blood chemistry analyzer. We would finally be able to run our own chemistry panels for our lab’s research section rather than having to pay another lab to run them for us. He was confident we would save hundreds each month. On paper, he was right. The tests would cost mere pennies each with our own machine. He overlooked one important fact.

In his attempt to save money (it was 2008…the economy was a wreck), he had ordered a dinosaur!

The Hitachi 911 was a top of the line chemistry analyzer…in 1993. However, when it found its way to our lab in 2008, it was due for donation to a museum. In fact, the company that originally manufactured it informed me, when I called them for a copy of the service manual, that the Hitachi 911 would be “sunsetted” in 2009. That meant there would no longer be service parts or support available for this machine. Despite this new knowledge, our esteemed medical director wished to continue with the installation of this prehistoric beast. We would simply get our reagents and any parts we might need from a third party supplier. We scheduled a week for the used equipment dealers from which the machine was purchased to come down from Minnesota to complete the installation and training for this treasured “new” tool.

The Hitachi 911 came, packed in a huge shipping crate, a couple of weeks before our appointment. So, it sat in the lab hallway. One day, my husband walked over to eat lunch with me. He saw the big crate in the middle of the hallway, and immediately had a plan for all that wood. Of course, my boss was only too happy to have someone else dispose of the giant crate. Our lab was in the basement of the veterinary college, and the hallways were small. The crate almost completely blocked up the hallway where it was sitting, forcing everyone to take the long way from lab room to lab room. My boss was anxious to get rid of it!

The big installation and training day came. The instrument was unpacked and installed. That afternoon, our training began. This machine had to boot from a floppy disk. Do you remember those? There was no operating system. I found myself transported back to my early childhood, watching my dad program his big machines to make all sorts of metal doohickeys.

It was fairly late in the evening when we finished for the day. I called Andrew to come pick up that shipping crate. It was dark, and we were in the midst of a rare central Texas snowstorm (and the fact that we were calling it a snowstorm amused our guests from Minnesota greatly). Andrew got the crate loaded up in my truck, and we started home. When we got there, he stacked it all up in the garage.

Soon after our training, it was time for Bear to come, and I had to go on maternity leave. I was gone for 2 months. When I returned, I found that nothing had been done with the much-anticipated Hitachi 911 while I was gone. It had sat idle for 2 months. So, I started to work on getting it up and running and validated for diagnostic use.

As I started running it continuously, one part after another started breaking. We would order a new part from our third party supplier, and I would use the service manual to try to replace it.

Week after week brought setback after setback. Our medical director became impatient. I was working long hours, and all I really wanted to do was be at home with my new baby. I sure didn’t want to spend my days in a futile war with an ancient piece of laboratory equipment! However, while I was working late, locked in this hopeless battle, my husband was going home on time. He used his free time at home before I got there each evening carefully crafting something new and exciting from all of that wood he had gleaned from the shipping crate in which my arch-nemesis had arrived. The work was slow and tedious. He wanted to make sure that the final product would last for years to come.

Four months later, I put in my resignation. I was fed up with that machine. I din’t want to be there, and my husband and I were fairly certain that we could make it work on just one income, if we were very very frugal.

My husband made a huge dining room table out of the shipping crate that the Hitachi 911 had come out of just a few months earlier. When he finished putting it together, it barely fit in our dining room in that little house we had it town. It was so big that we couldn’t even reach each other to pass food back and forth. It seemed a little ridiculous back then, for us to have such a large table where there were only the three of us for dinner regularly (and one of us was a little baby!). But our family would grow!

Today, in our farmhouse, the table fits a little better, though it’s still pretty big. But now, that table is full at dinnertime. There are six of us to sit around it now. In fact, my husband will have to build bench seating in the near future so that the soon to be seven of us will be able to fit! It has served us well for nearly 9 years now.

My husband and I still claim that our dining room table is the ONLY good thing that ever came out of that shipping crate!